When I got the unconscious boy topside, Ariyl was still surrounded at the boat, with a sword in each hand, fighting off six pirates. There’d been attrition.
One pirate flung a belaying pin at Ariyl. She sliced it in two and went right back to her swordplay. He flung a second and she did it again. And again.
“Kill the witch!” screeched Ben Gunn.
But her swishing blades were twin buzzsaws they could not get past.
Behind Ariyl, one pirate climbed up the rigging, sliced off a line and swung like Tarzan toward her, sword in hand, a sadistic sneer on his lips.
I called out, “Ariyl, behind y–!”
Abruptly Ariyl tossed one sword high in the air, yanked a knife from her belt, threw it through the rope, and the next instant the pirate, his sword and his lips were all on the deck.
Pirates actually looked up to watch what she was doing. Ariyl caught the sword and resumed dueling.
“Stop fighting me, you idiots!” she yelled. “You can’t win! You’re all dead if you don’t get off this ship!”
“Wait...what if the witch be right?” piped up Ben Gunn.
The brigands paused in their assault.
“Maybe we should swim for it!”
They looked at each other. The next second a rogue wave swept over the deck amidships and they were all gone. Ariyl clung to the dangling rowboat.
I staggered over to her with the boy in my arms and swung him into the boat alongside the others.
“What did you do?” cried Ariyl, staring at my tourniquet on John King’s knee.
“Saved his life. Climb in, I’ll lower you with the block and tackle!”
I needed to swing the boat clear of the ship and lower it. The block squealed as I dragged four yards of rope through the tackle and raised the boat a few feet.
Ariyl stared up at an incoming wave thirty feet high.
“No time!” She scooped me up in an instant and dropped me in the boat. “Tie yourself to him!”
I did a couple half-hitches on my wrist and then lashed the boy’s wrist to mine, also over the crosspiece.
Meanwhile Ariyl broke open the block, grabbed the ropes on either end, lifted our boat onto the rail, and then, bracing herself, lowered us over the side. Then she jumped down into the rising surf beside us, and clambered into the boat. I began rowing us away from the foundering vessel.
“Let me row!” she hollered above the gale.
I passed her the oars. After a couple flubbed strokes, she was able to duplicate my rowing motions, only with far more powerful strokes. Within seconds, she was a one-woman Olympic crew. She sculled us up the side of the rising wave at a jet ski clip.
“Have you ever surfed?” I yelled.
“Not really!”
“How about bodysurfed?”
“Nope! Don’t like to swim!”
“Just keep rowing over the waves till I tell you! We can’t afford a wipeout!”
Ariyl rowed us over the crest and we slid down the giant wave’s backside. Another mountain of water arose, bearing down on us.
“Faster! Get to the top so we can catch it as it’s breaking!” I hollered.
Ariyl churned the roiling waters with her oars as we ascended the huge wave to a dizzying height.
“Turn us around!”
“How?”
“Reverse one oar!”
Ariyl immediately brought us about and aimed us at the shore. We were atop a four-story-high slope of foaming seawater.
But we were losing the wave.
“Now, row with it! Row-row-row!”
Ariyl’s broad shoulders and sinewy arms got the workout of her life as she raced us back over the cresting breaker. The wave picked us up and sped us onward, the boat skidding diagonally down the front of it, just ahead of the tons of brine crashing over our heads while we shot towards the cliffs.
As we sped past the trapped Whydah, the same wave we rode smashed down on the wreck, toppling the mainmast. I could no longer see anyone alive in the rigging or on the deck.
We zoomed onward toward the beach and the cliffs. For a pulse-pounding fifteen seconds, I was optimistic that the boat could carry us to safety.
Then the world flipped over and we were plunged into the breaker itself. I could feel the boy’s form slipping away from me but the rope linking us held. I felt myself tossed down onto the seabed, then tumbled over and over underwater until I blacked out.
The next thing I knew, we were in the shallows. The boat was gone. My wrist was still hitched to that of the unconscious John King, along with a piece of the shattered thwart, and we were both tucked under the left arm of Ariyl Moro. The limp bodies of the helmsman and the carpenter were clamped under her right arm. She staggered through the surf, carrying all four of us up onto the beach.
“You can put me down,” I told her.
She set me on my feet. I stared at her. A lightning flash showed that the red was already fading from her irises.
“Have I told you lately that I love you?”
“I still haven’t forgiven you.”
“I was lying. You told me to make you mad.”
“You didn’t have to do such a good job.”
“I love you. Only you.”
“Hmph.”
I kissed her.
“Now, put ’em down.”
Wind and rain lashed us as she handed me the boy. She lay John Julian and Thomas Davis on the sand and snapped the ropes off their wrists.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. You?”
“I kinda want to do that again,” she admitted.
“Not a chance.”
She peered down the beach.
“I wonder if Ludlo made it.”
“Shot in the head and knocked into killer surf? I give him even money,” I said.
I bent over the two unconscious men beside me. Julian spasmed, turned over and coughed up water. Then Davis did the same.
“They’ll live.”
“How’s John?” she asked.
“Gotta get him to a hospital, fast.”
“Go.”
“What about you?” I asked.
“I have one more stop. If we solved the asteroid problem, there should be no more paradoxes. I’ll meet you back at Sven’s on April second, 2019. I hope.”
I held my Time Crystal and spoke the coordinates: Children’s Hospital, Sydney, Australia, six A.M. on April second, 2019.